Long Time Gone

by J. A. Jance

  “Heather!” Ron exclaimed.

  What the hell is she doing here? I wondered. And how did she get past Mel?

  At the sight of her stepdaughter, Amy made as if to rise to her feet. Jared whimpered and half awakened. “Don’t move.” I recognized Dillon’s voice at once. “Stay where you are,” he commanded. Saying nothing, Amy subsided back into her seat and patted Jared’s shoulder until he settled again.

  Without a glance in her parents’ direction, Heather walked as far as the middle of the room and stopped. Yes, it was stupid for her to be there. It was also terribly dangerous, but even as I feared for Heather’s life, I couldn’t help but applaud her courage as she stepped into the noman’s-land between her family and her troubled boyfriend. Standing deathly still, she fixed her unseen boyfriend in an unwavering gaze.

  “I tried to call you,” she said. “You didn’t answer the phone.”

  “I lost my charger,” Dillon said. “The battery ran down.”

  Both Mel and I had been afraid Heather would fall apart when it came time for her to confront Dillon. At the sound of his voice, Heather’s cheeks, flushed from being outside in the cool air, paled suddenly, but she didn’t back off.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. “What are you doing here? And what are you doing with that knife?”

  A knife! I felt a surge of panic. Kevlar can protect someone’s chest from flying bullets, but the soft armor would do little to protect Heather if Dillon came after her wielding a knife.

  “Why did you run away?” Dillon asked in return and without answering any of Heather’s questions. “Why did you leave me?”

  “Because you hit me,” Heather replied matter-of-factly. “Don’t you remember?”

  Ron must have missed the bruising on Heather’s face as she hurried past him. Hearing the news that his daughter had been assaulted hit Ron hard. His hands darted reflexively toward the wheels on his chair. I had little doubt that his first fatherly instinct was to charge across the room and smash Dillon Middleton’s face into a million pieces. Had I been in Ron’s place, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have, but with amazing self-control Ron forced his hands back into his lap and left his chair parked next to the couch. Only fear for his daughter’s life could have forced him to stay where he was.

  “I didn’t mean to,” Dillon replied. “Hitting you was an accident, but that’s why I’m here. I came back to get you. I need you with me, so I came back.”

  “All right,” Heather said. “I’m here. Let’s go.”

  “No,” Ron said. “Heather, you can’t do this. You can’t go with him. If he’s already hit you, what do you think he’ll do with that knife?”

  “I have to go, Dad,” Heather said. “Leave me alone. Come on, Dillon.”

  I realized then that Heather was still trying to keep to our original game plan. When Dillon’s cell phone hadn’t worked, she had somehow eluded Mel and Brad and come inside to carry out her part of the deal. And she was absolutely right in doing so. Whatever was going to happen next couldn’t take place in a living room full of people.

  Before Ron could raise another objection, I moved into the doorway far enough that he could see me. I mimed that he should zip his lip and then mouthed the words, “Let them go!”

  Turning away from Dillon, Heather walked as far as the front door and held it open. Then she turned back to Dillon. “Well,” she said. “Are you coming or not?”

  Dillon moved forward. When he reached Heather, he grabbed her with one arm. Then with his other arm, the knife arm, wrapped around her shoulders, they stepped outside.

  My part of the job was to usher Amy, Ron, and the kids to safety. Hurriedly I ducked back out of sight behind the dining-room wall.

  As soon as the front door slammed shut behind then, I heard someone shout, “Freeze!”

  I didn’t wait to hear more. I charged out of the dining room. “Come on, come on,” I yelled at Amy and Tracy, who both seemed astonished to see me. “Into the kitchen, quick!”

  I grabbed the startled Jared from his mother’s arms and carried him to safety. Amy and Tracy were right behind me, with Ron in his wheelchair bringing up the rear. I handed my now-wailing namesake, Jared Beaumont Peters, over to his father and then raced back to the front door. I shut off the interior lights before I opened it. Just as Heather and Dillon must have done, I had to pause on the porch for a moment before my eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light.

  When I could see again, there was Dillon’s Focus parked in the middle of the drive. Brad stood on the driver’s side of the vehicle, and Mel Soames stood on the other. Both had their weapons drawn and were pointing toward the Ford’s interior. “Drop the knife!” Mel ordered.

  As I moved closer, there was some illumination from a nearby streetlight, enough that I could glimpse a single occupant in the front seat of the vehicle. If Dillon was holding Heather down on the far side of the seat, if he was threatening her with the knife, he was probably too preoccupied with the weapon to turn the key in the ignition. That explained why the Focus wasn’t running.

  Taking in the chilling scene, I lost all hope. With two .38s trained on the vehicle from the outside and with a drawn knife inside, Heather Peters didn’t stand a chance. And if she got hurt or died, it really would be all my fault.

  “Put down the knife.” This time Brad issued the order. “Put it down and step out of the vehicle.”

  But nothing happened. The car door didn’t open. The knife didn’t tumble onto the driveway. Determined to help, I charged off the porch, only to be knocked off balance by someone coming toward me at breakneck speed.

  “Help him, Uncle Beau,” Heather pleaded as I righted myself. “Stop them before they shoot him. Please.”

  Overwhelmed to realize Heather wasn’t being held at knifepoint, I clutched her in a quick but heartfelt bear hug. “All right,” I said. “I will, but you have to go inside. Don’t come back out until we say you can.”

  Without waiting to see whether or not Heather did as she was told, I sprinted forward.

  “Come on, Dillon, we don’t want to hurt you,” Mel was saying. “You’re not going anywhere. Now put down that knife.”

  “We shouldn’t have done it,” I heard Dillon say as I reached the back bumper of the car. “I’m sorry.”

  There was a sudden flurry of movement from the driver’s seat.

  “Shit!” Mel Soames exclaimed, and she wasn’t talking about the Special Homicide Investigation Team. Brad leaned inside and retrieved the knife. He emerged with both his hand and the knife dripping with blood. By then I could see what Mel had meant. Dillon Middleton sat slumped sideways in the driver’s seat with blood gushing from a self-inflicted wound to his gut.

  “No!” Heather shrieked from behind me as she darted toward the car.

  Seattle’s award-winning EMTs arrived within two minutes of receiving my 911 call, but I suspected long before they got there that no matter what medical magic they brought with them, it would be too little too late to save Dillon Middleton.

  CHAPTER 21

  ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE after that. By the time the aid car took off for Harborview Hospital with Heather and Dillon on board followed by the rest of the Peters family, West Highland had filled up with cop cars and media vans. Queen Anne Hill was no longer my turf. In this instance, it wasn’t Brad’s or Mel’s, either. Temporarily relegated to the sidelines, we stood in the rain watching the proceedings just like the other neighborhood onlookers.

  “I guess you heard what Dillon said.” Mel’s comment was a quiet one, but it packed a gut-wrenching wallop, because I had indeed heard what he said. “We shouldn’t have done it.”

  It was pretty apparent that the “we” in question had to be Dillon and Heather. And as for the “it”? That had to be the murder of Rosemary Peters. All three of us—three sworn police officers—had heard what might well turn out to be Dillon Middleton’s deathbed confession. Dillon was on his way to a hospital and maybe a funeral home. As for Heather? If w
hat Dillon had said was true, Heather Peters might well be headed for prison. The idea that she had played a part in her mother’s murder had been a possibility all along. I simply hadn’t accepted it. Now it was unavoidable.

  “She told me she didn’t do it,” I muttered. It was difficult to speak. My heart was breaking for Ron and Amy—and for me. I was glad it was raining. With water coursing down my cheeks, I hoped people wouldn’t notice some of it was tears.

  “She lied to you, Beau,” Mel said. “Kids lie all the time.”

  “Are you going to arrest her tonight?”

  “Probably not,” Mel said. “Tomorrow will be plenty of time. It’ll take that long to get an arrest warrant. Here.” She held out her hand.

  “What’s this?”

  “A present for you,” she said and handed me a spark-plug wire.

  “That’s how you kept him from leaving?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good thinking,” I said, slipping the wire into my pocket. “And good work. How did you get her away from him?”

  Mel shrugged. “We didn’t dare make a move as long as Dillon was holding the knife to her throat. But when they got close to the car, he let her loose. I think he really believed she was running away with him. That’s when we made our move.”

  “She probably was running away with him,” I said. “And all the time I thought she was doing what she was doing to help her parents.”

  “She was helping herself,” Mel said.

  Sick at heart, I couldn’t argue the point.

  A tow truck picked its way through the assortment of parked cars and came to collect the Focus. I was walking over to hand the spark-plug wire over to the tow-truck driver just as a uniformed officer popped the trunk. He lurched back several paces, and I heard him gasp, “Oh my God!”

  When I turned to look, I saw that a bloodied corpse had been jammed into the tiny trunk. As soon as I saw the face, I knew who it was—Molly Wright.

  A pair of homicide detectives had already been summoned to the scene of Dillon’s attempted suicide. Now Captain Kramer appeared as if on cue. He didn’t bother glancing at the car or at the open trunk. Instead he made straight for me.

  “What the hell is going on here, Beaumont? I thought I told you to stop screwing around in my cases.”

  Mel Soames stepped out from behind me before I had a chance to respond. “Like it or not, it happens to be our case, too,” she said reasonably enough.

  “My associates,” I interjected. “Melissa Soames and Brad Norton. And this is a former associate of mine,” I added. “Captain Paul Kramer, Seattle PD Homicide, but then I believe you two have already met.”

  Kramer leered at Mel. “Oh, it’s you,” he said sarcastically. “So the SHIT squad is out in force—the attorney general über alles.”

  I didn’t like his tone. And even though Mel Soames’s figure was definitely worthy of leers, I sure as hell didn’t like the way he looked at her, either. For her part, Mel seemed singularly unimpressed.

  “One of the suspects in the Rosemary Peters homicide just tried to off himself here in his vehicle,” Mel told him. “But it turns out he left a little something behind for you to work on, too.”

  For the first time Kramer looked inside the trunk. One glance was enough to leave him stricken. Kramer always talked a good game, but he was never all that solid when it came to crime scenes and dead bodies. I figured that was one of the main reasons he had majored in paperwork—and butt kissing.

  He turned on his detectives, who had caught their first glimpse of Molly Wright’s body seconds after Kramer. “Has anybody here gotten around to calling the ME yet?” he groused. “What the hell’s the matter with you guys? And get this crime scene roped off. I don’t want anyone walking around in here. That goes for you and your pals there, Beaumont. Get the hell out and stop messing up our evidence.”

  I would have said something, but Mel laid a restraining hand on my arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Walking away from Kramer, I headed for my car, which was parked several houses down the street. As I wove my way through the haphazardly parked phalanx of vehicles, Mel came trailing after me. She caught up with me when I stopped to unlock the car door. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “You notice Kramer didn’t ask if we knew who the victim was,” I said.

  Mel nodded. “And I noticed none of us volunteered that information, either.”

  “It’s going to take time for him to figure it out. In the meantime, I’m on my way to Harborview to let Amy know what’s happened. I’d rather she heard the news from a friend rather than from Paul Kramer or the ME’s office. What about you?”

  She patted her cell phone. “I’m going to get on the horn to Harry I. Ball and Ross Connors—for the same reason. They need to hear about all this from us, and it can’t wait until we get around to doing our paperwork. From the looks of those satellite vans, the story will be all over the eleven o’clock news.”

  “Want a lift back to your car?” I asked.

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I’m already wet.” She started to walk away.

  “Mel?”

  She turned and looked at me. “What?”

  “Thanks for what you did tonight,” I said. “No matter what happens to Heather now, at least we gave her a chance. She’ll be able to plead her case in front of a judge and jury. If she’d gone off with Dillon, there’s no telling…”

  “So when Brad and I get around to arresting her, there’ll be no hard feelings?”

  “Right,” I said. “None.”

  She walked away, disappearing into the haze of rain and flashing lights, while I headed for the hospital. It wasn’t a trip I relished. The last time I had sat in the Trauma Center waiting room, I had been there with Sue Danielson’s two boys, sitting with them when the doctor came to give us the bad news that she wasn’t going to make it. I had known that Sue was gravely wounded, so I guess I had been prepared.

  Tonight, though, for Amy, news of Molly’s unexpected death would come with no warning at all, and at a time when the Peters family was already operating deep in crisis mode. Was it better to have such an emotional blow delivered by a friend? I hoped so.

  The room where life-changing news was delivered daily—the place where loved ones waited and worried, wept, hoped, and despaired—was impossibly ordinary and not particularly comfortable, either. Three separate family groupings huddled miserably in various corners of the room.

  The Peters family was divided into two separate camps. Tracy and an anguished, ashen-faced Heather sat at a table in the middle of the room. Amy, with the sleeping Jared’s head once again cradled in her lap, sat on a sagging couch. A uniformed officer, perched on a nearby chair, was interviewing Ron.

  Nodding at Ron, I made my way over to Amy. “How’s it going?”

  She looked up at me, shook her head, and smiled wanly. “I don’t know what to hope for,” she said. “If Dillon dies, it’ll break Heather’s heart. If he lives, he’ll still break her heart. The truth is, though, he held us all at knifepoint, Heather included. In my heart of hearts, I hope he dies and goes straight to hell. Is that wrong?”

  “Not wrong,” I said. “And I don’t blame you.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Especially not now,” I told her. “Now that I know the rest of it.”

  “The rest of what?” Amy asked.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Amy. Molly is dead. Her body was found in the trunk of Dillon’s vehicle a little while ago. There’s no official cause of death right now. It’s too soon. When I left, the ME had yet to arrive on the scene, but I believe she was stabbed to death.”

  Amy’s hand went to her throat. Her face blanched. “No,” she said. “That’s not possible!”

  Ron, catching sight of Amy’s stricken expression, pushed away from the officer and rolled over to his wife’s side. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Molly,” Amy
said. “Dillon’s killed her.”

  Ron looked at me for confirmation. “Is that true?” he asked.

  “We don’t know for sure,” I said. “Not this soon, but Molly’s body was found in Dillon’s trunk. From the amount of blood, I’d say he stabbed her repeatedly.”

  “But why?” Ron demanded. “I thought Molly was Dillon’s friend. When he showed up at the house with his knife last night and threatened us if we didn’t tell him where to find Heather, I never doubted for a moment that he’d use it on me, but I don’t understand why he’d go after Molly.”

  Amy roused the sleeping Jared and handed him over to his father. “I’ve gotta go,” she said. “I have to go tell the folks.”

  Without a word, Ron took the child into his arms. I would have expected him to say something conciliatory, but he didn’t. There was no word of comfort or condolence from Ron as Amy stood up and smoothed her skirt. That surprised me.

  “If you’d like some company, I’ll be glad to drive you,” I offered.

  “Thank you,” she murmured. Seemingly struck by some kind of indecision, she stood staring at Tracy and Heather, who were sitting halfway across the room. “Would you please tell Heather, Beau?” Amy asked. “I can’t do it. I just can’t.”

  I didn’t want to tell Heather any more than Amy did, but not for the same reason. Dillon’s damning “we” had placed Heather firmly in the enemy camp. And if she had been a part of her own mother’s murder, it didn’t seem likely that Molly’s death would come as a surprise to her, either. But I didn’t say any of that to Ron and Amy. I simply got up and walked over to the table where Heather and Tracy were sitting, their heads bent together in quiet conversation. When I got there, I could see that Heather was crying.

  “What do the doctors say?” I asked.

  Heather raised her teary face. “Nothing,” she said. “They haven’t told us anything at all. He could be dead by now for all I know.”

  “What do you know about your aunt Molly?” I asked.